


The Golden Ovomorph

by firecat



Category: Alien Series
Genre: Alien Biology, Dreams, Dreamsharing, Eggs, Gen, NEST - Freeform, Waiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:47:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28451136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firecat/pseuds/firecat
Summary: An Ovomorph nest has communal dreams.
Kudos: 2
Collections: Froday Flash Fiction Little & Monthly Specials 2020





	The Golden Ovomorph

**Author's Note:**

> For Froday 100th Special prompt 48: golden egg

The Queen had laid the eggs and left them to wait.

Somewhere back in her lineage of host DNA had been a gene for iridescence. Not all of her offspring received the gene. Those that did had iridescent, golden pods. 

The Ovomorphs in this nest had once numbered in the thousands. They had grown slender tendrils, connecting into a complex network. Through the tendrils passed both nutrients and the memories of the Queen, which in turn were made up of the memories of her species, and the knowledge brought via the DNA appropriated from their hosts. 

In this way, the nest of Ovomorphs dreamed. 

It dreamed of worlds their species has ruled once upon a time. Fertile, wet worlds, teeming with life ready to be taken, to be transformed. 

It dreamed of hard worlds, cold and dry and windy. Inhospitable to its kind. Worlds where the building of nests took centuries, for life was rare and bitter, and creating the protective environment for the eggs used too many of the Queen’s resources. The Queen might hibernate and never awaken. Or she might be fortunate and sense, in the distance, a new source of energy — a crashed spaceship, a fresh group of would-be colonists. 

Fragments of the dreams of the host species mixed in and also passed along the network. Flying. Running. Crawling. Even swimming. The savage lust of the predator, bringing down a meal. The joy of a scavenger, coming upon a great carrion feast. And even the contentment of a creature who led a slow life, feeding on the same sessile beings whose skeletons it used as shelter. 

Most of the eggs in the golden Ovomorph’s nest had died off, one by one. They lived for a long time, waiting for a host to impregnate, but not forever. As each one died, a tiny part of the network went quiet. The silence encroached and grew, as if it too were a creature that devoured life.

The last golden-skinned Ovomorph had almost passed from dreams into dreamless hibernation. Only the faintest tendrils of the once vast network of communication passed into its leathery case, flickered in the creature that waited within for a chance to fulfill its reason for existence. 

Faint, arrhythmic vibrations on the surface of its world began to grow stronger. Not the geological processes of the planet (once rich with life, now barren and inhospitable), but the stirrings of some kind of purposeful life, headed this way.


End file.
